Solved Think I've wiped ALL off HDD (O/S included)..dratt..

Had a new Western Digital HDD 500gb external drive today, for use in a PVR, ready formatted to NFTS, found a good internet site to change it to the required FAT32 for the PVR - then decided to partition it to D & E drives, then the trouble started!!!, somehow I've managed to delete everything on it I think, the PC's d: works fine - checked it with another USB stick, all OK, but when the HDD is plugged in...nothing at all, it detects nothing in the drive, no error message, unless I get the pc to 'see' it, I cannot re-format. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions for a non-techie ??. Thanks for any suggestions....Colin.

You have a Western Digital Drive. Download the FREE Acronis WD for your drive from Western Digital. Go here:http://support.wdc.com/product/down...and select your drive and follow the link to the download. As long as you have one WD drive plugged in you can use the software for your partitioning and formatting.

FAT32 can be converted to NTFS without data loss but not the other way around. And you can't format unless there are partitions to format. You need to explain more clearly what you did & which software program you used to do it. You may be able to recover your data but we can't help if you don't provide enough info.

Hi jefro, perhaps you can find your way around a 500 gb drive when it stores files in just one partition. Bad enough on a PC with a logical file directory, but with the Technomate PVR the window only shows 5 - 6 files at a time, out of an eventual ???'s !!!. New clean virgin drive, so partition b4 use, I think.

Hi riider, have got the drive working again using the Vista disk management, first reformatted to NFTS, took about 6 hrs, then used http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/gu...to format toFAT32, but Vista disk management had the partioning 'greyed' out as an option. Any ideas of useful progs on the net to partition it to say 4 partitions. Thanks for replies. Colin

You have a Western Digital Drive. Download the FREE Acronis WD for your drive from Western Digital. Go here:http://support.wdc.com/product/down...and select your drive and follow the link to the download. As long as you have one WD drive plugged in you can use the software for your partitioning and formatting.

Thanks fingers, have WD utility and tried to install it but get error message ( 'There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. The program for this install to complete could not be run. Contact support or your package vendor). This machine runs Vista Home Basic and didn't see it was supported on the WD site for this prog.. I have emailed support at WD and will update here on any reply for future references. In the meantime, any ideas ???. Thanks for the great reply, should have done the trick. Colin.

Did you try a fresh download? Sometimes you get an error during the download and that might have been your problem. If it works on XP and works on Windows 7 then it should have not trouble with Vista which is very similar at it's core to Windows 7.

Hi Fingers, tried to re-download, no go. But have solved it mainly, firstly format all on HDD to NFTS as simple volume, then partition it as NFTS, then run the Windows conversion utility above for EACH partition, partly by trial and error found that I was able to allocte up to about 75gb (when I tried 100 and 150 had error message on conversion utility and no go), so the HDD is partitioned, but pvr will only read 4 drives and works fine, can live with that for the time being. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR GREAT HELP and if you can work out why the conversion will not do 100gb, would be good, but I will sometime increase the partion sizes to a maximum that the conversion will work on then go see if the pvr has a limitation of 4 drives.

Searching around, FAT32 does support volumes larger than you have been able to achieve so the problem is probably with the the program. Microsoft says XP installer cannot format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB but that a Windows 98 Install Disk can, so that is a thought http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463 , or you can just try different partitioning software until you hit on one.

The information on Computing.Net is the opinions of its users. Such
opinions may not be accurate and they are to be used at your own risk.
Computing.Net cannot verify the validity of the statements made on this
site. Computing.Net and Purch hereby disclaim all responsibility
and liability for the content of Computing.Net and its accuracy.